Gotta check later, but it came to me. I think error was generated between chair and keyboard.

There is an old efi system partition with kernels on an extra drive in the system. I use it for /home, and other things. Totally forgot about that esp and its contents. Must be it.

Probably a massive brainfart on going on here, but If anyone has any insight, it seems I need another pair of eyes on this problem.

I've been using rEFInd for years, and love it. I have manually installed it.

/boot is ext4
/efi is mounted at /boot/efi, and is vfat

rEFInd has no problem detecting the bzImages I place into /boot/efi/EFI/linux. It includes a menu item for each kernel I copy there on the next boot.

I even have gotten Windows 8.1 booting through rEFInd.

My problem is this. I accumulated years worth of linux kernel menu items in rEFInd. I decided to pare things down, so moved all but one bzImage*.efi to /boot/efi/EFI/refind. This directory is supposed to be unscanned by rEFInd on startup. All the kernels still appeared in the menu. I moved them to a different hard drive completely, and told rEFInd not to scan that volume for kernels/bootloaders. They still appear in the menu, yet no longer boot. Finally I deleted the kernels completely from all filesystems. I still have ineffectual zombie menu entried in rEFInd.

Just a thought, remove the .efi extension and use the option "scan_all_linux_kernels". I use that option and i don't get the zombie menu items problem, so maybe there's a bug with the "dont_scan_dirs" and "dont_scan_volumes" options.